Pages

Tuesday, 16 October 2012

Raspberry Pi now shipping with upgraded RAM at same price

Raspberry Pi is now shipping with an upgraded RAM of 512MB, Eben Upton, the founder of the Raspberry Pi foundation has announced in an official blog post. However, what’s even better news is that the upgrade will come at no extra cost to its users. Upton elaborates that the latest version of RPi has come after users suggested the launch of “a more expensive “Model C” version of Raspberry Pi with extra RAM.” He shares that such a suggestion would benefit those users who look at Pi as a general-purpose computer, with a host of large applications running at the same time, and would "enable some interesting embedded use cases (particularly using Java) which are slightly too heavyweight to fit comfortably in 256MB."

However, Upton admits that they intend to keep the $35 price tag as their highest price point. Keeping this into perspective, the announcement pertaining to all Model B Raspberry Pis shipping with 512MB of RAM as standard came into being.

Going further, Upton shares that those who placed the order earlier, and have not received it from either distributor, will receive the upgraded device in place of the 256MB version, which they originally ordered for. Customers should start receiving their units of the Pi anytime now. Upton adds here that the RPi foundation will be making a firmware upgrade available in the next couple of days to enable access to the additional memory.

He signs off by saying, “I’d like to thank our partners, RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell, and the suppliers, particularly Samsung, Sony and Broadcom, for all their help in delivering a smooth transition to the 512MB. I’m looking forward to seeing what you all get up to with your shiny new Pis.”

The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently announced revision 2.0 of their boards. The team behind the Pi explained in a post on its website that the second revision won’t feature anything major, such as a new processor or more memory, but will instead incorporate several changes based on the feedback the team has received since the original device was launched. The foundation states that revision 2.0 devices would be “filtering out over the next month as the last stocks of the revision 1.0 at each distributor and in each geography are exhausted”.

Revision 2.0 of the Raspberry Pi will feature a small change to the GPIO pin out to add ARM JTAG support and to present a different I2C peripheral from that which is used on the camera interface. We also get a reset circuit, which can be used by fitting an appropriate header to P6, as the team has not fitted the header in the standard build. Shorting P6 pin 1 to P6 pin 2 will cause the BCM2835 to reset.